Hacker News Reader

Comment by willbw | Hacker News Reader

You don't need an iPhone to use a Mac.

All of your daily use items will work nicely on MacOS. In addition the look/feel + performance of the new M1 Macbooks is excellent. Keyboard is a vast improvement.

One point is that the 16 inch mac is quite heavy. I have a 14 inch Macbook Pro, its great and a bit lighter as long as you are happy with the smaller screen.

I would recommend MacOS. I think most people enjoy it once they get used to it.

To me the Mac + MacOS is the best developer experience - it has many of the developer Unix tools available that you would want from linux, plus it "just works" and devices (audio, keyboards, bluetooth etc) all work without me having to think about it. The display is beautiful and if it breaks, you can just take it to an Apple store (though I've never had an issue). More bespoke linux laptop setups can be nice but I think you're introducing some fragility into your life when you do that, compared with just using a Mac.

View on HN

This might not be the general consensus but in my experience development on a Mac feels extremely sluggish, mostly because of the window manager.

There's no window tiling, no true fullscreen for many apps, forced (and pretty slow) window animations, no drop-down terminal, changing windows and desktops is often slow (especially if there's multiple of the same app open), and the file manager lacks many QoL features. It definitely feels like it does not cater to power users at all.

The worst part is that nothing is customizable, and if it is it's often only through some third-party app that costs $20.

"changing windows and desktops is often slow (especially if there's multiple of the same app open)"

Cmd + ` (key under escape)

I'm aware of that and use it, but it's only useful if you're alternating between two or three windows. If you have many instances of the same app then you need to use mission control which has a long animation and requires the mouse.

I use a free library for window arrangement that automatically resizes and moves windows to different parts of the screen.

The window animations and changing desktops is buttery smooth for me.

Just the way Mac OS renders fonts is enough reason for me to use Mac over Windows.

My personal setup is using iTerm2 with ohmyzsh. It’s an amazing dev setup. Blazing fast and very easy to use.

I don’t really use Finder on Mac, although with iTerm2 you can command click on any directory and open it in Finder.

In the past couple years, I’ve been doing lots of C++, Java, Scala, and some Python. Builds are pretty dang fast. I restart once in a long while after Apple updates.

The only annoying thing was on my Intel Mac, it would get very hot when building C++ code. That’s been squared away on my M1 Mac. Also, battery life is incredible.

I agree. I use Moom https://manytricks.com/buy/moom and https://www.alfredapp.com/ which I think add most of the stuff I like. To each their own but I think if you are willing to spend maybe $20 then you can probably find something (though I agree it should be customizable with stock OS!)

For me $10 for Moom which I use every single day is okay. I mean, if you're using a Mac you probably have to resign yourself to paying a slight premium for everything so if you're not willing to do that then I can see how it might be a frustrating operating system.

w/r/t the tiling. You should check out this app for the tiling/snapping stuff

https://rectangleapp.com/

Although not as natively customizable as Linux. I've found everything I need that I miss from other OSes on mac. There are a lot of highly motivated developers that come up with some really nice apps/extenstions/etc.

FWIW I've been using macOS/Windows/Linux for over 12 years. Every OS has it's warts. I'm still kind of baffled that Windows doesn't have native Explorer tabs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com